Art, Tech And Hemp Combines For Modern Château Living
A chic Parisian couple decamped to Le Château du Marais for their ambitious enterprise.
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In the autumn of 2020, when the whole world suddenly came to a halt, city dwellers began concocting all kinds of escape fantasies. Some imagined moving to a rural area and becoming sustainable farmers; a number nursed long-dormant artistic ambitions; still others devised plans for new tech ventures, with visions of blockchains dancing in their heads.
But one Parisian couple, Victoire de Pourtalès and Benjamin Eymère, dreamed up a project that combined all three of these scenarios, plus a few more. Their bold new venture, as Eymère explains while steering his Citroen Ami electric buggy toward their hemp field in the French countryside, is a kind of highbrow ecological amusement park: “an open-sky R&D laboratory” that links art, nature and science.
It helps that the couple’s new base of operations is Le Château du Marais, a magnificent 980-acre estate in the French countryside that’s been in de Pourtalès’s family for generations—and that gives their enterprise, 91.530 Le Marais, its name (the number is courtesy of the local zip code). De Pourtalès grew up in its extraordinary Louis XVI-era château, encircled by a moat. But for her and Eymère, the main draws of the place are the forests and fields that surround it. And although wheat has always been the area’s chief crop, hemp got the couple’s attention for its potential as a sustainable super-plant: It requires no pesticides, grows quickly and can be used to make eco-friendly alternatives to pretty much anything, from construction materials to face creams. It’s biodegradable, of course, and because the entire plant can be used in various ways, there’s almost zero waste. They harvested their first crop in September. (Like marijuana, hemp is a cannabis, but its cultivation is not restricted since it contains minimal amounts of the psychoactive compound THC.)
The couple checking on their hemp crop. Christopher Bagley
To those who knew the couple well during their previous lives at the heart of the Paris cultural scene, their new roles are only mildly surprising. Granted, they weren’t exactly farmer types: de Pourtalès cofounded VNH Gallery and was a director of David Zwirner’s Paris space until 2020, while Eymère is CEO of L’Officiel Inc., the international magazine group, and cofounder of the blended-sake brand Heavensake. But they and their two young sons have always spent weekends at the château, an hour south of the city. De Pourtalès’s father was an avid naturalist and homeopath who treated her childhood sniffles with potions made from herbs he gathered in the woods. She still likes to take invigorating dips in the moat.
Coffee and croissants for breakfast. Christopher Bagley
Whenever they’re in work mode, both de Pourtalès and Eymère tend to think big. One of their early moves was hiring Kulapat Yantrasast, the Bangkok-born, Los Angeles– and New York–based architect who’s a favourite in the art world, to devise a plan for an outdoor arena adjacent to the hemp fields. Built primarily of wood and “greencrete”—a hemp-based answer to concrete—and surrounded by a newly planted bamboo forest, with two soaring portals at the entrance, the space will host cultural and community events, and maybe the occasional fashion show, after it’s completed next year. “You can do concerts, art shows, festivals, farmers markets, anything,” says Yantrasast. A former disciple of the Japanese architect and concrete master Tadao Ando, Yantrasast is gung-ho about hemp’s promise as a green building material. “Concrete is great, but it has its limitations,” he says. “It’s not recyclable. And hempcrete is much more porous, so it’s better at absorbing heat and sounds.”
Architect Kulapat Yantrasast atop a hay bale near the outdoor arena he’s designing. Christopher Bagley
Part of what drew Yantrasast to the project was de Pourtalès and Eymère’s innovative approach to keeping the château’s history alive. Grand ancestral properties, Yantrasast points out, have a way of becoming money pits, and aristocratic families often fumble in their attempts to keep them going: “How do you sustain the glory of the past while bringing something new to it?”
The answer for de Pourtalès includes a year-round arts-and-culture program, which she sees as a natural extension of the estate’s terroir. The château has been a haven for artists and writers since the early 19th century, when memoirist Madame de la Briche hosted a well-known literary salon here and intellectuals such as François-René de Chateaubriand were frequent long-term guests. De Pourtalès’s great-grandmother, American-born heiress Anna Gould, continued the tradition after moving in in 1897 following her marriage to Count Boniface de Castellane. Today, de Pourtalès says, more and more artists are feeling a primal urge to live amid nature while using it as inspiration. Meanwhile, the Paris contemporary-art scene keeps gaining prominence worldwide, which is “great for the galleries and for the city—but sometimes we forget about the artists,” who don’t always have good spaces to create.
The château’s ballroom. Christopher Bagley
In 2019, de Pourtalès began a residency program, hosting artists in some of the estate’s outbuildings. Last year, young French painter John Fou spent two months prepping an equestrian series that he exhibited in the form of a conceptual merry-go-round, inspired by the property’s 100-odd horses, with all the canvases positioned in a circle and facing inward. In October, Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt displayed a large piece of fabric that she’d buried on site for three months, part of her ongoing explorations of the mutability of everyday objects. Later this year, alongside a creek next to the arena, construction will begin on a village of at least two dozen “artist stables”—small studio dwellings, also made of greencrete and designed by Yantrasast. They’ll be available for overnight stays to all kinds of visitors, including school groups and nature-starved weekenders, as well as artists, musicians, architects and writers hungering for what de Pourtalès describes as a “creative community.”
Artist John Fou in front of two of his paintings, inspired by the estate’s horses. Christopher Bagley
On the technological front, the couple have turned to the latest science to reimagine the old-school agrarian château model. Although the French countryside is dotted with picturesque farm plots, many outsiders don’t realise that the agricultural system here was industrialized decades ago. Eymère and de Pourtalès are looking to re-establish a more holistic, more sustainable connection between grower and land through the use of precision farming methods, which aim to increase productivity while reducing the environmental impact. A Russian company called Acron created a custom fertilizer for the hemp field’s clay-rich soil. Digital monitoring devices installed atop the portals of the arena will gather climate data that can be shared with neighbouring farms. And instead of just selling the crop at harvest time, the pair are heavily involved in developing the products that will contain their hemp, partnering with established small-scale manufacturers. In addition to the greencrete, they’re working on textiles and yarns, as well as natural oils for beauty products. A blockchain system will allow full traceability, “from the seedling all the way to the final material,” Eymère says.
“Bringing tech to the rural environment is a good business proposition, but it’s also a good artistic proposition,” he adds. “We are seeing more artists working with scientists.” The château’s inaugural art exhibit last summer, Phytocene, was the brainchild of two musicians and a biophysicist. After placing probes in the hemp field to track the intricate ways that individual plants communicate with one another, the artists turned the data into a video-and-sound piece and projected it on a giant wall in one of the estate’s stunning old granaries. At the time of writing, the couple are still planning the 2022 calendar, but already on the lineup is a dual residency by the young artists Bianca Bondi and Guillaume Bouisset, who intend to collaborate on an “alchemic installation” in the granaries involving halo-bacteria, minerals and crystals.
Phytocene, a sound-and-video work by Agoria, Nicolas Becker and Nicolas Desprat, exhibited in a former granary. Christopher Bagley
Like more and more French people their age and younger, de Pourtalès and Eymère, both 40, possess an entrepreneurial instinct that runs counter to the rigid and retrograde stereotypes that have often plagued their countrymen (particularly the ones who live in castles). Eymère has a law degree from NYU, and de Pourtalès has organized art exhibits on multiple continents; their social circle skews predominantly creative and international. “Without the foreigners, Paris is not Paris,” de Pourtalès says. “Of course, some Parisians will say that they’re very happy without foreigners, but they can’t survive without them.”
A few of the couple’s more cautious friends have asked them if they’re attempting to tackle too much. Among their latest product ideas is a hemp-based artisanal gin. De Pourtalès smiles and shrugs. “Yes, it’s ambitious,” she says of 91.530 Le Marais. “But we’re doing it little by little. It’s really a lifetime project.”
A view of the moat and gardens. Christopher Bagley
De Pourtalès and Eymère have also just renovated and moved into the château’s 18th-century carriage house, which is closer to the farm than the grand main residence (where de Pourtalès’s mother and aunt still live). They’ve stocked the place with contemporary artworks—ceramic pieces by Eric Croes, a painting by Cy Gavin, a tiled installation by Mimosa Echard—and enrolled their sons in the village school. From their garden they can hear the tractors, smell the horses and monitor any storm clouds that threaten the fields.
“I used to find it boring when farmers talked constantly about the weather,” de Pourtalès says. But after the couple planted their first round of bamboo seedlings last summer, they endured several straight days of downpours. “It just kept on raining! So of course that’s all we talked about. Then we totally understood. Farming becomes your life.”
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Forever Young
You’re born, you live, you get old—right? Well, not according to a growing legion of death-dodgers who are prepared to pay any price to reverse the ageing process.
It is, by any estimation, a meeting of strange bedfellows. Gathered here tonight, at the table of a centi-millionaire venture capitalist living in Venice, California, are Kim and Khloé Kardashian, Kris Jenner and the manfluencer-neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. And the reason this hybrid crew has assembled? Part evangelism, part investment drive, and mostly about discussing how to never, ever die.
The menu that evening—black lentils over drifts of veg with berry-strewn nut pudding—nodded to what the head of the table eats every single day, albeit in separate sittings and all before 11.00 am. Bryan Johnson, who sold Braintree Venmo to PayPal for US$800 million (around $1.2 billion) in 2013, now devotes his life and fortune to winding back his biological age. What he calls his “Don’t Die Dinners” manifest a trend in health and wellbeing where the vision of living to 120, 150 and beyond, has moved from anti-ageing scientists, elite athletes and tech eccentrics to a whole new level of celebrity.
“The two futurist topics everyone is obsessed with right now are artificial intelligence and living forever,” says neuroscientist and futurist Joel Pearson. “Interest in longevity has exploded over the last eight months and that’s because of Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die campaign.”
In March, when doctors injected 300 million young Swedish bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) into Johnson’s knees, hips and shoulders, it was in a clinic in the Bahamian resort owned by Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods. The 47-year-old—that’s in chronological years; his heart has the biological age of 37—consumes 32 kg of vegetables monthly and more than 100 pills a day, hits bed strictly at 8.30 pm and will repeat the MSC therapy next year so his joints match his already youthful bone mineral density. Other biomarkers show he has the cardiovascular fitness, muscle mass and nighttime erections of a fit 18-year-old. Johnson’s waking hours are devoted to a regimen of therapies and exercises continually recalibrated by a team of more than 30 doctors, with one goal: to slow down the ageing process. Or as Johnson is fond of saying: “Is death no longer inevitable?”
One of Johnson’s July dinner guests, the charismatic Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, has helped propel this notion of extreme longevity. Huberman Lab is Apple Podcasts’ most popular health and fitness show, and the 16th most popular podcast across all categories. His self-optimisation ethos appeals to the acolytes of the show’s manly backer, former UFC fighter Joe Rogan.
“It’s that bro science,” says Pearson, who heads the Future Minds Lab at UNSW and himself adheres to a routine of saunas, kava and red-light therapy to improve sleep. “It’s the young guys in the gym with the ice baths and the hormones and the hunting.” (Because testosterone declines in men starting from their 30s, attempting to boost the hormone through abstinence has become an ideology of a particularly butch patch of anti-agers; getting good-quality protein by shooting your own is another.)
DJ Steve Aoki (46, but biologically 33) has equipped his Las Vegas home with ice plunge tubs, saunas, pulsed electromagnetic field mats, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and a tea bar . He has “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” tattooed across his neck and says he’s signed up for “the full-body freeze”—the cryopreservation of his body for future revival.
While US-based futurist Dr Divya Chander says this euphoria around stretching longevity has not extended to women—“I think they still feel limited by their biology”—Hailey Bieber has shown that the gender divide might be shifting. On an episode of The Kardashians, the 27-year-old model (biological age unknown) underwent an intravenous infusion of NAD with her friend Kendall Jenner. NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is a compound in the body that supports cellular process. “I’m going to NAD for the rest of my life and I’m never going to age,” Bieber said on the show. She was visibly joking yet Jennifer Aniston, 55, told the Wall Street Journal last year that she’s also used NAD+ IV drips, and Kourtney Kardashian, 45, calls her liquid form of NAD “the genetic key to longevity”.
The Sydney-based founders of UAre, an app designed to increase longevity, say that in the early years of testing, men and women responded differently to the product. “The conversation with men was more about winning,” says co-founder Marc Pasques. “‘I extended my lifespan by a year by doing more exercise’, or ‘I extended it by two’. Women talked about hanging out with grandkids.” But he goes on to admit that gap in motivation is closing.
Are has just opened a $1 million seed round and forecasts $10 million in revenue in 2025 and $30 million in 2026. There’s money to be made in extending youth, if not eternal life. Bryan Johnson sells Blueprint basics for US$333 (around $495) a month. The Harvard biologist and author of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, David Sinclair (chronologically 55; biologically 42), who controversially advocates for resveratrol—a plant compound found in red wine and grapes—as an anti-aging drug and who says there are no limits to how long we can live, has co-patented a skincare line with Caudalie.
Professional services giant PwC argues that the oft-used estimate of the global market value of longevity therapeutics at around $65 billion by 2030 does not take into account the potential for these to replace conventional therapeutics in healthcare. Australia’s first medical facility to offer personalised longevity programs, Longevity Medicine Institute, opened in Sydney’s Double Bay in July. “People are coordinating their aesthetic care with longevity doctors,” says New York-based celebrity cosmetic dermatologist Dr Paul Jarrod Frank, whose clients include Madonna. “They’re using supplements like NAD, newer peptides and various manipulative efforts to try and look younger and live longer.”
Similarly Don Saladino, the personal trainer who’s shaped up Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, emphasises age-extending practices in his star clients’ programs as strongly as any aesthetic goals. As Ryan Reynolds readied himself to assume a “tight-as-hell” costume for this year’s Marvel movie Deadpool & Wolverine, Saladino coached the 47-year-old through better sleep practices, walking and increasing dietary fibre. He reframes strength training as not just body-sculpting but as creating “body armour” for later life, to prevent the falls so catastrophic for the elderly.
And Chris Hemsworth, who plays another Marvel superhero Thor, included efforts to stave off the onset of dementia through meditation and exercise alongside Arctic ice plunges in his bid to increase longevity in the TV series Limitless.
The man who was Australia’s deputy chief medical officer during the Covid-19 pandemic questions the lure of many supplements and longevity interventions. As host of the 9Network’s Do you Want To Live Forever series, Dr Nick Coatsworth visits Okinawa, a “blue zone” where an astonishing number of inhabitants live past 100 in good health. There he watches some local elderly dance to hip-hop. “All that biohacking people do, it’s just a waste of time,” he says. “To live longer, you have to spend time with good friends, keep moving and have a good diet.”
Joel Pearson, who stopped taking resveratrol and NMN supplements years ago after research showed mixed results, agrees. “If there’s compelling evidence showing frequent sauna users can get a 40 per cent drop in all-cause mortality, then why would you spend time worrying about a molecule that has very small effect?”
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Only The Good Die Young
In a future of floating
billionaire summits,
do we really want to
live forever?
Two thousand tech moguls, shamans, CEOs and DJs packed together on a cruise ship for what organisers call “invitation only, one of a kind experiences where super humans make magic”. What could go wrong? That’s the pitch for Summit at Sea, an event billed as a “floating Davos” for millennial technocrats, staged in international waters off Miami. But even if the marketing lingo sometimes threatens to sink under its own weight (“Wherever your gravitational force takes you, our constellation offers wonder”), Summit at Sea captures something about the zeitgeist of what billionaires are looking for now.
They want woo-woo; they want to microdose mushrooms, ketamine and LSD (as championed by the likes of Sergey Brin and Elon Musk), and they most certainly don’t want to die. This issue is about those issues. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel are among the squillionaires bankrolling longevity initiatives— presumably to live long enough to be able to spend all their money. But as Alison Boleyn reports in her first story for Robb Report, even those outre efforts—Thiel is said to receive blood transfusions from people under 25—pale when compared to Bryan Johnson, who reportedly spends $2 million a year on anti- ageing methods. For those of us who can’t afford eternal life, however, the good news is the world is still full of earthly delights.
Take the healthful effects of the Greek island of Tinos or driving the new Rolls-Royce around Ibiza, for example. We also check into an integrated wellness clinic in Thailand and a luxury resort in Spain that focuses on gut health—miso soup and a side of algae, anyone?—and luxuriate in Guerlain’s stunning new day spa outside of Athens. And we spend time with Rory Warnock, a breathwork practitioner and ultra-marathon runner whose tips for curing anxiety and promoting wellbeing are being sought by everyone from CEOs and Olympians to companies like Google and Bupa. And like us, he’s also partial to a well-made negroni. Oh, waiter? Maybe we’ll let the ship sail without us.
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Breathing New Life
Ancient cultures have used it for thousands of years to cure anxiety and promote wellbeing; now everyone from CEOs to Olympians are discovering the health benefits of breathwork.
Rory Warnock is not your typical new-age guy. When we meet him, he’s sipping a negroni overlooking the ocean at Casa Amor in Saint-Tropez, dressed in an open-neck shirt, expensive sunglasses and a jaunty Hermès silk scarf tied around his neck; no kombucha teas or healing-crystal necklaces here. His relaxed posture is a far cry from 10 days ago when he was preparing to run a 200 km marathon through the Tian Shan mountain range in remotest Kyrgyzstan. “I carried everything I’d need for six days in the mountains. My pack weighed 10.8 kg on day one, excluding water. And I surprisingly ended up coming third,” he says.
According to Warnock, this staggering feat of endurance was mainly down to one thing: breathwork.
Proclaimed as an all-natural wonder drug by an ever-growing chorus of scientists, doctors and fitness enthusiasts, breathwork describes the act of inhaling and exhaling in a way that brings an overwhelming, sometimes euphoric, sense of calm and balance to your body. Though it dates back thousands of years—evidence has been found to suggest the practice was adpoted in ancient India, and shamanic cultures in South America, Africa and Australia—modern-day breathwork broadly falls into two different categories.
The first is the mindful breathing that forms an essential part of yoga and meditation: alternate nostril breathing, or box breathing, are taught as simple physiological tools to downregulate the nervous system and move the brain from fight or flight mode. It’s believed these simple methods re-tune brain chemistry, by reducing the amount of noradrenaline to the organ—akin to popping Valium or taking a perfectly safe mini-tranquiliser.
The second is holotropic breathing, which is deep, transformative breathwork. Devotees says it’s more like taking a mushroom trip. Pioneered by Dr Stanislav Grof in the ’70s, it invloves laying on your back in the dark and following a sequence of breathing patterns as you’re guided by a trained facilitator—and is often set to music. It’s claimed that this more intensive work can yield powerful results by connecting to the subconscious, releasing accumulated trauma and accessing inner wisdom.
Nine years ago, Scottish-born Warnock took a risk. He traded working for a successful packaged goods company in London for a career as a breathwork coach in Sydney—long before his passion was an internet buzzword. The move, however, was not necessarily driven by financial motives. “I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at a pretty young age, like 21 or 22 years,” he says, taking another sip of his negroni. “I was pretty much crying myself to sleep for about three years and I didn’t really understand what was going on.”
Dissatisfied with being prescribed “a little white pill” by his doctor and given a “pat on the back”, Warnock began to look for new ways to heal his condition. “I tried to do everything I could to improve myself in a more holistic way and so I got into running,” he says. “I changed my lifestyle.”
And more significantly, he discovered breathwork, giving him a new mission in life. “When I first heard about it, I thought ‘breathwork’, that sounds a bit ridiculous. Someone is going to tell me how to breathe in a certain way and it is going to change how I think and feel and ultimately perform day-to-day? But I went along to one session and that one hour changed the direction of my whole life. I was hooked on the feeling. I was hooked on the immediate effects, hooked on feeling joyful, happy, strong, empowered.”
In person, Rory’s enthusiasm is infectious, but his testimonials are, increasingly, backed up by science. A 2014 study by the Stanford Research Unit found breathing exercises to be effective for treating PTSD in combat veterans; and by 2016, US Navy seals started using breathwork to achieve calm and focus before battle. British neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson calls it the “the most precise pharmaceutical you could ever give yourself, side-effect free”, while some researchers claim breathing exercises are an effective, low-cost treatment for PTSD, bi-polar, insomnia, and can even help combat grief.
The general public are buying into the movement, too; according to a report by the Global Wellness Institute, breathwork has experienced a 400 percent uptick in popularity since 2019. And, unsurprisingly, billionaire technology titans, who are always looking for the next big health panacea, are buying in. “It’s all very steeped in Silicon Valley tech culture,” said Jag Gill, a New York-based banker turned tech CEO in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
Dr Smita Dsilva is an ayurvedic doctor (ayurveda being an ancient Indian alternative medicine) at the RAKxa Integrative Wellness in Bangkok, Thailand, a clinic that received celebrity patronage in July when supermodel Kate Moss passed through. “Breathing exercises have been used for centuries as a powerful tool to manage stress and anxiety, increase focus, and improve overall wellbeing. In the high-pressure business world, this is a simple yet effective practice, she says. “Giving attention to the breath promotes the purification of both the mind and body, while also raising the energy. It also frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts that promote anxiety… regular practice can release up to 80 percent of the body’s toxins through the breath.”
And breathwork is not just an elixir for various negative mood states. According to Dsilva, the practise can also help with aesthetic issues: “Kapalbhati pranayama is a specific breathing technique in yoga that involves forceful exhalations and passive inhalations, engaging the abdominal muscles throughout the practice. The vigorous breathing and abdominal contractions help reduce bloating and support the removal of toxins, potentially leading to reduced belly bloating and weight loss.”
These findings will not be news to the clients who flock to Rory Warnock’s breathwork school in Sydney’s Bondi suburb. Or to the Olympic athletes, AFL players and CEOs who are huffing and puffing his studio door down on a regular basis. Most likely due to his soft Scottish accent and self-effacing manner, Rory has been adpoted by a raft of high-calibre companies, including Google, Amazon, BUPA and Energy Australia, eagre to learn how mindful breathing can bring better productivity to the workplace. He’s an ambassador for Apple and Lululemon, and has evolved into a seasoned conference speaker. Warnock’s brave career-change gamble has clearly paid off.
When he’s not teaching the world’s movers and shakers how to harness the power of something that we all do around 20,000 times a day without even thinking, Rory has gotten into the habit of bookending his year with long-distance races; for him, breathwork and ultra-marathon running are intimately linked. But he insists that mental issues can be addressed on a more prosaic level.
“You don’t have to go for a 45-minute yoga class or a run,” he insists. “You can just do a few minutes or even a few seconds of breathwork and you can move from a low state, to a better mood state. And it is exactly the same with anxiety; if you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, there are breathing exercises you can do in real time to shift how you feel.” Negronis are allowed, too.
Rory Wornock, discover Rory Wornock’s breath lessons on Spotify.
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The Bird Man
Neil Perry returns to the Cantonese coop
with a sensational new Sydney eatery.
When Neil Perry was casing a potential venue for a new restaurant, a heritage-listed, modernist masterpiece in Double Bay designed by the architect and former Woollahra mayor Neville Gruzman, it reminded the celebrated chef of a birdcage. The image of the columbary building, all windows and dramatic vertical panels, captivated him. A year later, it has inspired the opening of Sydney’s most hotly anticipated new restaurant, Song Bird.
The three-level, 230-seater joins Perry’s other joints in the swank block —the award-winning seafood restaurant Margaret, the adjacent bar Next Door and the Baker Bleu bakery two doors up. It also marks a return to Cantonese fare for Perry, who made his name partly on the success of renowned Sydney eateries Wokpool and Spice Temple, and a welcome coming home for quality Chinese in the area.
“Bizarrely, there were two really great Chinese restaurants in Double Bay,” Perry recalls. “The Imperial Peking, just upstairs from where Scanlan Theodore is now, was terrific, and the nearby Cleveland was probably the best Chinese restaurant in Sydney in the early ’90s. That’s what I’m aspiring to.” What made these two erstwhile locations so good, Perry adds, was that they didn’t overreach: “Just beautiful Chinese food and great service. That’s the secret sauce.” It won’t be all Spencer Gulf king prawn dumplings, Peking duck, and steamed ginger and shallot coral trout. Rebel-rousing is also on the menu. Downstairs, in the old Pelicano space, will house Bobbie’s, a speakeasy in conjunction with Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson of New York’s renowned Caffe Dante, named after Pride’s grandfather, the legendary Australian broadcaster Bob Rogers.
The good times will also be rolling on September 17, when Robb Report takes over Song Bird to serenade Perry, our Culinary Master of the Year. When it came time to select the year’s standout gastronomic talent, the choice was easy. Ditto the avian-esque venue. As such, be sure to pick up our next issue for a special section devoted to Culinary Masters. It’s bound to make gourmands chirp with delight.
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Shooting Star
As her four-decade retrospective embarks on a national tour, convention-challenging Australian photographer Anne Zahalka is looking backwards to move forward.
Anne Zahalka’s office is a museum-worthy cabinet of curiosities. Located on the first floor of the photographer’s terrace in Sydney’s inner city, next to a room that serves as a makeshift studio, it is replete with the standard ephemera and clutter of an artist’s lair. On the wall in front of her desk hangs a portrait (taken by Zahalka’s aunt, a fellow photographer) of her mother as a young woman and a shelf filled with CDs, floppy disks and other outdated technology; on another, mounted shelves heave under the weight of 40 years of project folders.
“Maybe it’s because I’m getting older,” Zahalka, now 68, says over tea while flicking through the pages of documentation from her first show in 1981, “but I’m feeling increasingly nostalgic, and these folders are invaluable. Being able to go back to the year the works were made and looking at the documentation and research is beyond helpful. I turn to them all the time.” Behind Zahalka’s desk, a bookshelf teems with magazines and publications she has been featured in and go-to reference books on everything from trompe l’oeil to Goya and portraiture.
The curated miscellany is not only an invaluable source of daily inspiration, but as a maquette on top of a filing cabinet suggests, it is also a focal point of a new exhibition. Running through October 19 at Sydney’s National Arts School (NAS) before a national tour, Zahalkaworld—An Artist’s Archive is the most comprehensive survey of the photographer’s work since she emerged in the early 1980s and bloomed into one of Australia’s most thought-provoking artists. At the heart of the exhibition is Kunstkammer, a life-size immersive recreation of Zahalka’s office—albeit a bit tidier than in reality. “It’s the centrepiece of the show,” says the softly spoken artist. “I like to be generous about how my work is made and the thinking behind it. People don’t get to see that often, and this is an opportunity to open that up and share where I have lived and worked.”
Staged over the two floors of the NAS Gallery, Zahalkaworld, which debuted at the Museum of Australian Photography in 2023, presents more than 100 original prints from 15 series over the years, and assorted curios and collectibles from her office and studio. Her initial reworkings of Old Master and Early Australian paintings presaged a fondness for collage and photomontage, working with found historical images to tell new stories about underrepresented members of society. In one of her most famous works, The Bathers (1989), a recreation of Charles Meere’s Australian Beach Pattern (1940), she recasts the all-white original with a diverse cast of characters she encountered in the late ’80s after returning to Australia from a Berlin residency. “I’m interested in how we are represented and in our national image,” she says. “My work often tries to decode and untangle that and come up with other figures not represented in the culture.”
The exhibition marks a poignant homecoming of sorts for Zahalka, having studied at the NAS in the late ’70s before returning a few years later to teach photo-media. Sharing pride of place alongside six of her works from the gallery’s collection are five recent works that deal with natural history and incorporate images of old museum dioramas in her sharp, often humorous criticisms of tourism and other environmental interferences wreaking havoc on the planet. Cast aways (2024) is set against the background of a 1939 diorama of Lord Howe Island at the Australian Museum. But in Zahalka’s reworking, pioneering conservationists (lifted from another painting) examine plastic pollution while planes fly overhead, and contrails replace clouds.
Something is comforting, she adds, about recreating and reimagining these historical scenarios, even if it is to comment on the consequences of ocean pollution. As for revisiting her past, what has looking in the rearview mirror revealed about herself and her work? “Some things, like making these disruptions on history to speak about the current place we’re in, have remained the same,” she says. “But if this whole process of preparing for the show has taught me anything, it’s that there are a lot of parts to me.” The studio may be messy, but nostalgia has never looked so fresh.
Visit NAS Gallery for all ZAHALKAWORLD showing until 19 October.
Top image: Anne ZAHALKA, The Artist (self portrait) 1988, taken from the series Resemblance II. Silver dye bleach print, 50.0 x 50.0 cm. Image supplied courtesy of the artist, represented by ARC ONE Gallery (Melbourne) and Dominik Mersch Gallery (Sydney).
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13/09/2024
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